Dear Open Spirit Community:
It is such a pleasure and honor for me to join the community as a year-long intern and can’t wait to immerse myself with the harmony and healing in Open Spirit! While looking forward to knowing you all at a more personal level, let me first introduce a little bit about myself.
My name is Yining Lu (the pronunciation of Yining is similar to “evening”, yet without the middle “v”), and I come from China. I pursued my undergraduate degree at Middlebury College, majoring in Religion with a focus on Buddhism. I have changed my majors several times, from mathematics, neuroscience, psychology, and finally landed on Religion. The four years at college served as my opportunity for self-discovery, informed by the various academic disciplines I explored. I then firmly realized that instead of feeling smart, or accomplished through getting full marks in mathematical tests, I prefer to throw myself into the complex, confusing, and sometimes uneasy human interactions, to navigate a way to build harmony first from personal relationships, then extend to community building. Religion serves as the source of wisdom for answering questions like why does suffering occur, and how could we potentially reduce suffering.
I was thrilled to find Open Spirit as the dream place which is embodying the core values of hope, health, and harmony which I kept dear to my heart as well. I cherish the opportunity to work here, hoping to explore how to cultivate an inclusive space for interfaith conversations to happen, how to transmit core wisdom from different religious traditions to enlighten people at difficult times, to what extent should we keep the traditions intact and what are the skillful means to modify them according to different cultural needs. Coming from a cultural background which might be drastically different, I wanted to open up, observe and acknowledge the cultural imprints and my own habitual behavioral and thinking patterns which might have prevented me from more fully engaging and bringing healing and harmony in personal communications.
Thank you very much for your patience reading this letter, and I look forward to getting to know you better in the coming year, one filled with hope, peace, and love.
With best regards,
Yining Lu
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